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Deciding During Peacetime What Are Indispensable

SS Ohio reached Malta barely afloat. Relentlessly battered by German and Italian forces during Operation Pedestal (10–15 August 1942), the sole tanker in the Allied Santa Marija convoy had to be lashed to British destroyers as it entered the Grand Harbour. Yet Ohio delivered the 11,000 tons of fuel that Malta needed to put its aircraft and submarines back on the offensive against the Axis supply lines running to North Africa and, by extension, to sustain the defense of Egypt and the Suez Canal.

Allied losses were heavy during Pedestal. Nine of the 14 merchant ships in the convoy were sunk, and the Royal Navy lost an aircraft carrier, two light cruisers, and a destroyer. On the other hand, the Axis had merely two submarines sunk and several other ships damaged. That is why the battle was deemed a tactical victory for the Germans and Italians. It was a strategic victory though for the Allies because enough of the cargo critical for Malta arrived.

The 84th anniversary earlier this month of what Italian accounts called the “Battle of Mid-August” coincided with Han Kuang 42, where counter-blockade and quarantine drills were incorporated into Taiwan’s main annual exercise alongside islandwide urban-resilience training. Operation Pedestal, a relatively understated episode of World War Two, offers a useful lens for thinking about a cross-Strait contingency. To be sure, Malta in 1942 and Taiwan of the 2020s differ profoundly in geography, political context, and level of technology. Nevertheless, both raise the same hard question for a defender under pressure: what should be prioritized given finite resources?

The math does not augur well for Taiwan. It imports nearly 97 percent of its energy. Gas generated almost 48 percent of the island’s electricity in 2025, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) reserves cover roughly 12 to 14 days against oil stocks of 140 days. In addition, Taiwan has only three LNG terminals, all on the west coast facing China, and the fourth one will be completed only in 2037. The island also lacks food security, as 70 percent of its food by calories is imported, according to a 2024 study.

Taiwan’s current predicament is the “Ohio problem” at national scale.

Taipei is cognizant of its resources problem. President Lai Ching-te’s Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee convenes regularly and has run live exercises, and the island’s state-owned Taipower has committed NT$564.5 billion (approximately US$18 billion) to a grid plan to enhance decentralization and redundancy. Furthermore, Taiwan announced in March restart plans for two mothballed nuclear plants. The following month, Taiwan announced that it would hold its first joint exercise to escort LNG and oil tankers through a potential Chinese blockade. However, the island’s tabletops keep showing that current preparedness is “too romantic” for a real blockade, and that Taiwan still lacks resource depth.

The standard takeaway from Operation Pedestal for Taiwan or any other military scenario would be “harden, disperse, and stockpile” – conventional wisdom to security planners. More crucial would be the decision that has to come before these measures. A defender should be fully aware of what assets are truly indispensable and not find out what they are only after the outbreak of hostilities.

Ohio was chosen for Pedestal and prepared for it. Originally American-flagged, the vessel was requisitioned by the British, who strengthened her anti-aircraft armament and re-seated her machinery on shock-absorbing mounts so that near misses would not disable the engines. When Ohio was crippled, escorts positioned themselves to both sides of the vessel and literally dragged her to port, which meant those destroyers were screening nothing else. Pedestal planners had decided beforehand which vessel in the Santa Marija convoy was indispensable and accepted weaker cover elsewhere to ensure that it survived. However, SS Ohio escaped by the skin of its teeth with Lady Luck perhaps playing a significant role. One cannot bet on the fortunes of war being in one’s favor, and this is an argument for redundancy behind the priority.

While Taiwan has not declared what is truly indispensable to its survival during a cross-Strait contingency, its principal “Ohio” is arguably the energy-import chain. Declaring that focus and resourcing its protection is politically painful, because doing so amounts to stating what comes second. Which takes precedence in a prolonged Chinese blockade: the power allocation for the semiconductor fabs, or the civilian grid?

The upshot of not declaring a priority was shown in May with respect to military spending. The Legislative Yuan passed a special defense budget of NT$780 billion, roughly 38 percent below the NT$1.25 trillion the executive had sought. The reductions were not spread evenly. Funding for the indigenous Chiang-Kong interceptor, a core component of Taiwan’s mainstay T-Dome air-defense architecture, was left without a clear source, pushing parts of the program toward 2028. Furthermore, a procurement bill for drones (a key component of Taiwan’s asymmetric defense strategy) was blocked in June. Here, we see a case of a defender not ranking its requirements, and these requirements ended up being affected by a legislature doing arithmetic.

In view of its Ohio problem, the measures that should follow for Taiwan are hardly ground-breaking, but are worth affirming. Defense planners should reduce the number of Ohios, that is, single points of failure, and increase pre-positioned supplies of the most critical materiel: precision-guided munitions, air-defense interceptors, fuel, and food. On energy, that means such measures as pushing LNG storage toward 30 days rather than 12, adding receiving capacity on the less exposed east coast, as well as deploying floating storage and regasification units. Wartime resupply would still matter, but materiel already on the island buys the time needed to solve the harder problem of getting more cargo in. The real test is whether Taiwan can still fight for weeks or more.

Beijing’s advanced reconnaissance-strike complex (RSC) complicates the situation. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would find it far easier to locate and strike critical nodes than Axis forces found it to interdict convoys in 1942, and persistent surveillance makes fixed stockpiles easier to find than a convoy in the vastness of the sea. While dispersal does not totally hide one’s assets and forces, it changes the exchange rate in one’s favor. Destroy one dispersed dump and you have destroyed a fraction of the whole. To get the rest Beijing must find the others, thereby complicating the picture and imposing greater costs for the PLA.

Washington has its own Ohio problem, and the ongoing Iran conflict has revealed this in stark terms. Reporting based on internal Pentagon inventory assessments puts THAAD interceptor usage during five months of operations against Iran at almost 80 percent of the pre-war stockpile, with Patriot and Tomahawk inventories also heavily depleted. The Pentagon has denied these claims. The consequences of the Iran war have reached Taipei directly: a US$14 billion US arms package was held up, with officials citing the demands of the Iran campaign, against a delivery backlog already standing near US$29.7 billion. That was a decision over priority made during war and in another theater.

America faces the same resources issue as Taiwan. Intra-theater lift, tanker aviation, munitions stocks in Japan and the Philippines, as well as the sealift that would have to cross the same waters the Chinese RSC covers are finite. Theater posture debates tend to delineate only what will be defended. The destroyers that dragged Ohio back to port were screening nothing else, and that was settled before the convoy sailed rather than improvised when she was hit. US planners face the same dilemma as their counterparts in Taipei, which is to identify which capabilities are critical and accept lesser cover elsewhere.

The counterargument is that declaring a priority tells an adversary where to strike. Operation Pedestal is a poor rebuttal on its own terms. It is one case, and one in which nine of 14 merchantmen were lost, hardly proof that advertised cargo survives. But the argument does not need the historical case to stand. Beijing’s targeting is not information-constrained, as it already knows where Taiwan’s fixed nodes are, and no amount of secrecy on Taipei’s part will unmake that. However, the PLA may not know exactly where Taiwan’s dispersed stocks are, which is why dispersal buys some time for the defender.

All in all, the primary insight from the Battle of Mid-August and the vicissitudes of the Ohio for the next cross-Strait conflict is that it may be decided by whether enough of the right assets and systems survive to keep Taiwan fighting. That argues for a defense posture built around the capacity to absorb losses and remain in the fight.

Y. M. Hee is an independent defense writer based in Asia.

image:  Operation Pedestal via Gemini